Outreach Program would help police keep closer watch on city

Residents would help officers fight crime

The Takoma Park Police Department will give a new beginning to an old idea by focusing a fresh set of eyes on the city through its Community Outreach Program.

The program is based on a concept called Community Oriented Policing, or COP for short, which was enacted by Congress in 1994 under the Violent Crime Control & Law Enforcement Act. The program focuses on building a mutually beneficial co-dependence between residents and police officers. While the evolution of the program, known in Takoma Park as the Community Outreach Program, has spanned the stewardship of two previous police chief administrations, this time the program will focus more on the formation of citizen patrol groups under the supervision of a police liaison, said program director Officer Carla Magnaye.

"My main goal is to offer certain programs that the community can be actively involved in," Magnaye said.

She said her initial emphasis will be on encouraging more citizens to join neighborhood watch groups and reaching out to the city's scarce citizen patrol units.

"There are very few residents who participate in [those patrols], and they don't really have an interaction with the police department," she said.

Magnaye is convinced that, given proper motivation and police involvement, these patrols can become more than a sporadic presence and rise to fill an important need for the department, serving as extra sets of eyes and ears on the street to supplement the coverage of ordinary patrol units.

"They help us, which in turn makes our job easier and helps us provide better service to see their quality of life improve," Magnaye said, adding that she expects to begin the program with a series of meetings in the community to drum up interest and hand out surveys to find out what residents would like the program to do.

Seth Grimes, the former president of the nonprofit public safety group Safe Takoma Inc., did not share Magnaye's enthusiasm for the program.

Grimes also helps run his own neighborhood's periodic citizen patrol group, which walks in the Old Town area of the city.

"I'd say that, speaking for my neighbors, we'd much rather see police officers on the street on foot or on bicycles and have informal conversations with them during their patrol rather than come out to these monthly meetings with scripted conversations regarding outreach," he said.

Grimes worried that the department would ultimately lessen this kind of direct outreach by funding an outreach coordinator, a concern Magnaye was quick to address.

With three new recruits finishing their field training to serve the city full time beginning this month, the time is ripe to give organized outreach another chance, essentially at no cost, she said.

"It's not like they're taking an officer off the road," she said. "And that's why we didn't say, Hey, this is a permanent thing; we're going to institutionalize this.' Right now we're just going to see where it goes, but from what I've heard, residents have been wanting this."

Grimes acknowledged that citizen patrol efforts citywide are few and far between and could use some assistance.

"We lose people and we hardly gain any," he said. "I'd say we could definitely use some help. ... [But] expecting people to come to a monthly meeting is unrealistic."

Andy Kelemen, a member of the city's Chief's Advisory Board and longtime public safety activist, also had some reservations about the long-term success of the program, which he said he has seen come and go more than once in his 20-odd years living in Takoma Park. But he is still optimistic that this could be a fresh start for an old concept.

"It's a very, very old thing, not just in Takoma Park," he said. "Everything of this sort depends on how much follow-up is made and whether it becomes institutionalized. ... It will be interesting to see how [current Police Chief Ronald] Ricucci sees it unfolding."